Main menu

Sub menu

GUNS

May 16, 2018

(Sun Times Wire) Three men have been charged with orchestrating a scheme to illegally traffic guns from Kentucky to Chicago, using Facebook as a platform to arrange many of the illicit sales. Christopher Henderson, 23, of Louisville, Ky., and John Phillips, 23, of west suburban Hillside, and Jaiqail Wright, 23, of Chicago, were charged with…

May 11, 2018

(CBS) — Police Supt. Eddie Johnson will announce a milestone in the city’s fight to get illegal guns off the streets, with the 100th assault-style weapon seized by police this year. The announcement comes on the heels of one of the most violent weekends of the year in Chicago, with five people killed and 35…

December 22, 2017

(Fox32) Chicago police say they received no help from Facebook while they were investigating an invitation-only page that was used to facilitate the sale of drugs and weapons. The criticism came on Thursday, after the Chicago Police Department announced the arrests of more than 50 people who were said to have used an invite-only group…

November 3, 2017

(ABC) A man convicted of helping steal more than 100 guns in a 2015 freight train burglary has been sentenced to 11 years in prison. Patrick Edwards, 38, of Chicago, was sentenced to 132 months in prison by U.S. District Judge John J. Tharp Jr. in federal court today, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office.…

October 12, 2017

(Sun Times Wire) John Thomas set up the deal the way he had arranged nearly two dozen others. A friend said he wanted to buy as many guns as he could, so Thomas got in touch with someone he knew who had guns to sell.

The three of them met in the parking lot of an LA Fitness in Lansing at noon on Aug. 6, 2014. Larry McIntosh, whom Thomas had met in his South Shore neighborhood, took two semi-automatic rifles and a shotgun from his car and put them in the buyer’s car. He handed over a plastic shopping bag with four handguns.

None of the weapons had been acquired legally — two, in fact, had been reported stolen — and none of the men was a licensed firearms dealer.

Thomas did little but watch the exchange, but he got his usual broker’s fee of $100 per gun, $700 total. It was “the most money I’ve seen or made,” he recalled — his biggest deal yet.

It was also his last

Amid Chicago’s ongoing epidemic of gun violence — with 494 fatal shootings and 2,866 people shot this year through the end of September — the availability of guns has been blamed as a root cause and become a defining political and public safety issue.

Chicago police say they’ve seized nearly 7,000 illegal firearms this year, and federal authorities have stepped up efforts to take down dealers.

Still, it’s by no means clear that targeting those like John Thomas makes a real difference.

Most of the guns police seize in Chicago come from Indiana and other states where firearms laws are more lax, police and researchers have found. After they were purchased legally, most were sold or loaned or stolen. Typically, individuals or small groups are involved in the dealing, not organized trafficking rings, experts say.

Unlike the drug trade — often dominated by powerful cartels or gangs — illegal gun markets operate more like the way teenagers get beer, “where every adult is potentially a source,” said Philip Cook, a researcher at the University of Chicago Crime Lab who’s also a Duke University professor.

Under pressure to respond to the violence, law enforcement has focused on making examples of people caught selling, buying or possessing guns. But authorities acknowledge that these cases do little to stem the flow of guns into the city.

“You are a single salmon swimming upstream at Niagara Falls,” said Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department. “If your policing strategy is to decrease the number of guns in your city, good luck, because there are too many guns out there. It’s better to go after the person with the gun.”

An in-depth examination of Thomas’ case — based on police reports, court records and interviews, including a series of conversations with Thomas — shows how authorities target mostly street-level offenders, sometimes enticing them with outsize payoffs. In this and other cases, critics say their techniques raise questions of whether they are dismantling gun networks or effectively helping to set them up.

“You have this specter of whether it’s creating crime, which is troubling to a lot of people,” said Katharine Tinto, a professor at the University of California Irvine School of Law who has studied the investigative tactics of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “It’s not as if you’re trying to get someone you know is a violent gun offender. You’re going after someone and purposely trying to entice them into doing a felony.”

At 33, John Thomas has a charming smile that sometimes displays his chipped front tooth. His mother’s name, Val, is tattooed on his left forearm — a tribute to her for bringing him into the world, though he said he could never count on her. His daughter’s name, Jataviyona, is tattooed on his right shoulder.

Even as a kid, Thomas was a natural salesman, quick with a hustle.

“That’s my gift, I guess — to sell,” he said.

He grew up in the part of South Shore known as “Terror Town.” A short walk from a popular Lake Michigan beach, it’s long been a mix of middle-class homeowners and lower-income renters, with bungalows, condominiums and multi-unit apartment buildings on tree-lined streets.

By the time Thomas was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, the neighborhood was struggling. Many white homeowners and business owners had fled after African-Americans moved in.

Thousands of people in South Shore and surrounding communities lost their jobs when the nearby steel mills closed. When the crack epidemic hit in the early 1990s, gang violence soared.

Thomas’ father wasn’t around, and his mother struggled with addiction, according to Thomas and his younger sister, Sade Thomas-Adams. With five other siblings, Thomas was raised by an aunt and uncle he considered his parents.

Thomas’ uncle was a pastor, and the family spent a lot of time at church, giving him a lifelong faith. During the week, the kids were told to focus on their studies and come home right after school to avoid the dangers of gangs and drugs. Thomas and some of his siblings chafed at the rules, escaping from the house to hang out with friends, drink and smoke marijuana.

“They had their foot in both worlds — the church and the street,” said Thomas-Adams.

Thomas developed his first hustle while in grammar school, he said. He and his friends would offer to help shoppers with their bags and carts outside an Aldi supermarket. He learned he could talk to people and earn tips.

Thomas graduated to other ways of making money. First, he said, he sold baggies of fake marijuana. Eventually, neighborhood dealers set him up with real drugs.

In November 2001, when he was 17, Thomas was arrested for selling $20 worth of crack cocaine to an undercover police officer and was convicted and given probation. That was one in a long string of arrests, including a 2005 gun possession conviction.

Thomas began to sell marijuana and developed a successful promotional strategy. When customers bought a nickel bag — a small quantity for $5 — he gave them another for free.

“Two for five,” was how he marketed it. His profits, he said, came from volume.

“Everybody wanted it,” he said.

When he was 20, Thomas began to hang around a new convenience store so much the family who ran it offered him a job. Once again, he put his people skills to work. The store sold knockoff gym shoes, but some people didn’t want to come there because it would mean crossing gang lines.

“So I’m taking the shoes to them,” Thomas said. “I’m selling them shoes left and right.”

Gang violence was a stubborn problem in the neighborhood and moved ever closer to Thomas. At 16, he said he witnessed a fatal shooting. At 18, an acquaintance killed one of Thomas’ friends. Then, at 22, his best friend from childhood was gunned down.

Thomas said he tried to steer clear of guns.

“I know what they have done to people,” he said.

In late 2013, Thomas was desperate. Then 29, he was a father and the primary caretaker of his daughter, trying to leave criminal life behind. For several years, he’d worked low-paying jobs at restaurants, grocery stores and an uncle’s construction business, but he struggled to pay his rent. As a convicted felon, options were limited.

Then, he met Yousef.

Thomas had taken a job at a tobacco shop in Beverly, making $25 a day, he said. He hit it off with one of the guys who hung around the store. Yousef was in his 20s and, like Thomas, joked a lot. They started smoking marijuana together. Thomas said Yousef — who, through his lawyer, declined to comment — knew he was broke. Yousef told Thomas he could help — if Thomas helped him.

“He comes in and asks me about guns,” Thomas said. “I said that where I’m from, we don’t sell guns.”

But Thomas said Yousef kept bringing it up. At some point, he said, Yousef told him he knew a businessman named Pops who could give Thomas a real job if he helped them.

What finally persuaded Thomas, he said, was the dollar-store diapers he’d been buying for his daughter: They sometimes gave his daughter hives. He saw the diapers as a sign he was stuck, and his daughter was paying for it.

“It was just hard,” he said. “Too hard.”

Thomas made his first call — to one of his cousins — in January 2014. Steven Thomas, 38, had served time for attempted murder in his early 20s, court records show. Now, he was trying to rebuild his life. After earning an associate’s degree in prison, he was working to support his family and taking classes to become a massage therapist.

He said his cousin wasn’t sure at first but called back the next day: He’d come up with a couple of guns. John Thomas got in touch with Yousef and introduced him to his cousin at the tobacco shop. He said they went to the back of the store, and when his cousin left a few minutes later, Yousef paid John Thomas $200 for arranging the deal.

“Just for a call,” Thomas said. “I didn’t even have to do nothing.”

Thomas, giddy, said he used the money to buy food, baby formula and better diapers.

What Thomas didn’t know was that Yousef had paid Steven Thomas $400 for a Glock 9mm pistol — then immediately resold the gun for $800, court records show. Even after he paid Thomas, Yousef made a quick $200.

Everyone seemed to come out ahead. So the next day, the three men did it all again. Thomas talked with his cousin, who then sold two guns to Yousef, and Thomas made $100. Yousef then sold the guns to Pops for $1,600, twice what he’d just paid for them.

To Thomas, it was easy money — money he needed.

Thomas didn’t know, though, that Yousef was being watched by federal agents.

In January 2014, shortly before Yousef approached Thomas, the ATF had launched an initiative in Chicago to “attack violent crime associated with illegal firearms and narcotics.” As part of that effort, the ATF called on a longtime informant.

“Confidential Informant 1,” as he was identified by federal prosecutors, is not named in court records. He had worked for the government for nearly a decade, since being indicted for fraud and agreeing to cooperate. Gray-haired and squat, the informant posed as a businessman who wanted to buy weapons he could sell overseas, according to undercover ATF recordings and court records.

One of the people he approached about getting guns was Yousef. Authorities have not said why they targeted Yousef and why the informant’s cover story involved selling guns overseas.

Through a spokeswoman, the ATF declined to comment.

In January and February 2014, Yousef met with the informant, whom he knew as Pops, eight times for deals that involved 13 guns, according to court records. Some of those deals involved guns Thomas helped Yousef buy from Thomas’ cousin, the records show.

That March, ATF agents confronted Yousef: With Pops’ help, they had been monitoring his gun deals. Yousef faced the possibility of going to prison for unlicensed gun dealing. Or he could work for the government.

Yousef agreed to cooperate. In court records, he became “CI-3” and has not been identified by last name in Thomas’ case. From March to July 2014, the government paid Yousef a total of $6,380 for “living and operational expenses” in addition to the money he used to buy the guns, court records show.

Yousef got to work lining up more gun deals, continuing to use Thomas as his primary, but not only, middleman. After his cousin, Thomas brought in an old friend: Anthony Logan, whom everyone called Snake. Thomas told Logan he knew someone who often overpaid for guns.

In the spring and summer of 2014, Thomas, Yousef and Pops did several deals with Logan, who introduced them to other friends. When those sources dried up, Thomas arranged quick exchanges in an alley with people he didn’t know himself. There were handoffs in parking lots and a trip to Gary, Indiana, where the deal nearly unraveled and Thomas, hoping to salvage it, wandered the streets until he found the seller.

After each sale, Yousef met with ATF agents and turned over he guns and recording equipment he had secretly been wearing, according to court records.

As the money kept coming in, Thomas overlooked warning signs. One seller even tried to tell him he might be dealing with informants.

“My people are leery about you all,” Thomas told Yousef after talking with a gun source in the south suburbs, according to an ATF report. “They say you all the feds.”
Yousef vowed that he wouldn’t do any more business with that supplier.

Still, Yousef seemed willing to buy anything. While some of the deals produced semi-automatic rifles and high-powered handguns, he also bought guns that were rusty or had missing parts. On one occasion, Thomas even got Yousef to pay $700 for what turned out to be a BB gun — another warning sign Thomas ignored.

That summer, as politicians struggled to deal with violence in the city, Mayor Rahm Emanuel appealed to the Obama administration for help getting guns off the street. The ATF responded by announcing it was sending seven additional agents to Chicago.

At the same time, the number of sales Thomas had brokered passed 20, and he had to expand his sources to continue producing guns. He reached out to Larry McIntosh, the friend of a friend from the neighborhood.

McIntosh proved to be a consistent source. He sold Yousef more than two dozen guns in the summer of 2014 and promised even bigger deals through a connection in Indiana.

That August, he offered a package of at least 14 guns. Yousef and Thomas were set to make the buy on Aug. 26, according to ATF records. But Thomas said Yousef called him at home that morning and asked if they could meet for breakfast to talk about a job offer from Pops. Wearing a favorite Blackhawks shirt and nice jeans, Thomas stepped outside.

“It was, like, 5 in the morning,” Thomas recalled. “I see a gray PT cruiser [with] a white lady, she’s got a computer, and I’m thinking, what is she doing in this neighborhood at this time of the morning? I look on my left, and I see a gray van, and there’s some white guys in it, and I say, ‘Whoa, whoa, this is not right.’ ”

Moments later, one of his uncles arrived to give Thomas a ride, and they left. They had gone only a few blocks when police lights flashed behind them. Thomas was whisked to an ATF facility, where he was read his rights and questioned by two agents, according to the ATF’s video of the interrogation.

The agents told him he would be charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm.

“Me personally, I ain’t been doing nothing,” Thomas protested.

The agent leading the questioning showed Thomas a picture. “There’s you, holding a gun.”

After a long pause, Thomas said, “I didn’t buy nothing.”

“You didn’t have to buy anything,” the agent said. “We have you on video, holding guns. You set up all the deals.”

Thomas wanted to know if Yousef was working with agents from the beginning.

One of the agents said no but encouraged Thomas to become an informant. Thomas refused.

The next day, the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago announced 14 arrests on federal charges of illegally possessing or selling guns. Thomas was listed as the top defendant, followed by 13 other men involved in the deals with Yousef, including Logan, McIntosh and Steven Thomas.

If officials knew the original sources for the guns, they were not named in the court records.

In 2015, one at a time, the men entered guilty pleas. McIntosh — who two decades earlier was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after he accidentally shot a woman in the head — was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Logan got eight years and four months. Others received between 18 months and eight years.

In every case, prosecutors noted the gun violence battering Chicago and called for sentences long enough to send a message.

Many of the defendants, through their lawyers, insisted they had never sold guns until Yousef started offering to buy them.

“The government is not seeking to arrest those who are unlawfully selling weapons but effectively making gun dealers out of street-level hustlers by paying three and four times the street value of guns,” Ralph Schindler Jr., who represented Logan, said in a court filing.

The ATF’s tactics are, in some ways, similar to how federal authorities battle other issues. With political corruption, they have used cooperating witnesses to offer bribes to elected officials. Fighting terrorism, they have contacted and enticed disaffected young men to discuss possible plots. Whether any of those targets would have acted without prodding is hotly debated following an arrest.

The ATF spokeswoman would not discuss the agency’s broader strategies.

“We try to hit the top people as much as we can,” said a federal law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They’re tough cases to prove. If we can get them on one gun, we can get them off the street.”

Wesley Pickett, who is serving eight years for helping Yousef buy guns, admits he was wrong to get involved. But he argues that putting people like him in prison will not stem the flow of weapons.

“Getting a gun in the city,” he said in a letter from a federal prison in Pennsylvania, “is like buying a pack of cigarettes at a gas station.”

Yousef, too, pleaded guilty to unlicensed firearms dealing. He has not yet been sentenced.

After three months in jail following his arrest, Thomas made bail and, in spite of his pending case, got a job as a stocker at a Family Dollar store in Englewood. Within the year, he was promoted to manager.

Thomas blames himself for going after the money in the gun deals. But he doesn’t believe he played a role in Chicago’s gun violence. Though he is streetwise from years running his hustles, he said he believed Yousef’s claims that the guns weren’t headed for the streets. In time, Thomas said he stopped thinking about what was happening to the guns.

“Honestly, after a while, once [Yousef] told me that, I didn’t really care no more,” he said. “I just knew that my daughter was straight.”

As it turned out, the guns never got back to the street. The ATF bought or collected all of the guns Yousef purchased through Thomas.

In March, Thomas pleaded guilty to two counts of being a felon in possession of a firearm and one count of unlicensed firearms dealing. Prosecutors said that, over the course of seven months, he brokered 23 transactions involving 77 guns.

He faced 25 years in prison.

In August, Thomas went before U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood to be sentenced. Wearing a tan suit, tan shirt and blue tie, Thomas was accompanied by his daughter, the aunt who raised him, other family members and his pastor. At one point during the sentencing, he wept.

Nicole Kim, the federal prosecutor, gave him credit for working and caring for his daughter, then 4, but argued that a message should be sent that “if you need extra money, if you need a job, this is not OK.”

“He’s not proud of what he did,” said Heather Winslow, Thomas’ attorney. “But absent the influence of the government’s buy money, this crime would not have happened.”
Given the chance to speak, Thomas became emotional.

“People make mistakes, and I did,” he said. “I’m not a gun salesman.”

The judge noted that the government played a role in every deal for which Thomas was being sentenced. But, in spite of the government’s involvement, she told him he should have said no.

“It is difficult in some ways to reconcile the responsible worker and father I’ve seen in my courtroom with the person who would be willing to move 77 firearms,” Wood said.

The sentence: seven years in prison. She allowed Thomas to spend several weeks with his daughter before beginning his sentence.
On Monday, he reported to a medium-security federal prison in central Illinois.

September 7, 2017

(ABC 7) Klint Kelley left Chicago for rural Arkansas as teenager, hoping to get away from gangs and violence he’d known as city life. But federal prosecutors say as an adult, Kelley stayed connected to his hometown by trafficking guns. Kelley, 27, was arrested in Chicago Ridge on Sunday after driving 10 hours from his…

August 31, 2017

(dnainfo) A Chicago Public Schools teacher has been charged with dealing ammunition and gun accessories — and is accused of trying to buy handguns for a felon who was secretly working for the feds, authorities announced Wednesday. The teacher was identified as Brent Turpin, 53, an Englewood elementary school special education teacher with Chicago Public…

July 13, 2017

When a 12 year old kid is arrested with a gun, you can’t blame the child. It’s the parents’ fault. The child police took into custody Tuesday night after finding him in a West Side alley with a handgun in his possession deserves our compassion. But more than that, he needs help — because his…

May 10, 2017

Firearms instructors are reporting an increase in the number of black women learning how to use guns in self-defense courses around the country — and the reasons are varied. “Minority women are definitely increasing in numbers,” Rick Ector, a firearms instructor, said of attendees at his weekly course just outside of Detroit. “Women overall —…

May 5, 2017

To ring in the new year, Kevin Winford and Denis Joiner fired their stolen guns into the air. It was their bad luck that Chicago cops patrolling the South Side caught them in the act. Their foolish celebration on Jan. 1, 2012, allowed investigators to tie their two guns to a burglary spree in which…

April 29, 2017

Police are searching for three men who broke into a gun range in suburban Oak Forest Friday morning. Investigators say the thieves got into the Eagle Sports Range on 159th Street by breaking a window with a large cinder block. The stores surveillance system recorded the three black men taking guns and putting them in…

April 20, 2017

A Chicago Police Department tweet showing off the spoils of a drug and gun bust — including a long, antique pistol — launched a series of Twitter jokes about the shared photo. The guns have a, shall we say, “vintage” look about them, and the tweet set off a storm of dozens of people questioning…

April 18, 2017

Police seized handguns in two separate traffic stops Friday night in north suburban Evanston. The first stop happened at 6:47 p.m. when officers saw that someone inside a westbound vehicle in the 2400 block of Oakton Street wasn’t wearing a seat belt, according to a statement from Evanston police. They stopped the vehicle in the…

March 31, 2017

As far as federal authorities know, Willie Biles never shot anyone with the many handguns he purchased legally from Indiana gun shops. But it could be years before all the damage is tallied from criminal acts resulting from his reckless resale of the weapons that wound up in the hands of Chicago hoodlums. U.S. District…

March 28, 2017

A woman was arrested after police said they found a loaded rifle wrapped in blankets in a stroller she was pushing, and a handgun with extra ammunition tucked into a diaper bag in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. Police were monitoring cameras in the area of 45th and Wood streets because of gunfire there…

March 22, 2017

A Chicago man pleaded guilty Tuesday to brokering the sale of more than 70 illegal guns. John Thomas, 33, who is also known as “Batman,” pleaded guilty to two counts of being a felon in possession of a firearm and one count of dealing firearms without a license, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office. Thomas…

January 13, 2017

Chicago streets are marked with the remnants of gun violence. In a continuing look at how illegal guns are flowing into Chicago, WGN Investigates shows that modern day train robberies are bringing hundreds of guns to our city. The train robberies of the past are legendary, glorified in the movies. There are stories of shoot…

January 12, 2017

A Chicago man has been sentenced to more than five years in federal prison for illegally possessing and trafficking two dozen handguns, most of which were stolen from a train shipping firearms on the South Side in 2015. Warren Gates, 49, had 24 stolen firearms, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s office. Seventeen…

January 3, 2017

This is story of a gun that was stolen from a legal gun owner in a south shore apartment in 2015. The Chicago Police Departments ballistics division traces the trail of the misery caused by this ONE gun across Chicago neighborhoods.
Maggio News

November 8, 2016

On Monday the Chicago Police organized crime units seized 4 assault weapons in targeted raid in 1600 block of South Spaulding in the Ashburn neighborhood. The weapons confiscated are a Mac 11; Mac 10; AK47 & kel tech 9mm. These are all military grade weapons that are in the hands of Chicago street gangs. CPD…